Tinder and I are in a love/hate relationship. It was yesterday that I reinstalled the app and created my account again after little over a month without. The exercise was less disappointing than previous times. There were actually some seemingly interesting guys in my radius, so plenty of matches. It had been a while that I actually used the app to chat with local guys. Previously I’d only swipe for expats or when I was abroad, as I’m generally not really into Dutch men. But there was this adventures looking local with who I matched and he started a conversation. After some chit chat, he asked me about my latest Tinder date. My reply was: “Deleted Tinder for some weeks. Had a 86 hours lasting Tinder-date in October. Needed some time to reset from that. Set up my account again today. But I’m still a bit anti. Not sure what I’m doing here really. How about you?”

Let’s go back to October:
I was on vacation in Hawaii and staying in a perfect Airbnb in a quiet area on the East side of Oahu. On a Thursday morning I sent out a random Good morning to one of the Tinder matches. Just for some local suggestions on where to go to and what to do in the neighborhood. We started chatting. Within a couple of texts back and forth we agreed to meet for coffee.

Emoji’s should clarify the meaning of a text. When we started texting, it wasn’t always clear in which voice we should read the words. Due to the absence of intonation, volume, facial expression in text messages, there was the inevitable confusion and misunderstandings. So then came the smiley. At first, it was clear what they meant. But nowadays we have tons of different emoji’s. Face expressions my human face can’t even make. And this results in us being back at where we started. Again, they leave us with confusion and misunderstandings. A NEW IMPORTANT EDIT TO THIS POST